Yale New Haven Health Advances Breast Cancer Screening Goals with Commure

SAN FRANCISCO – Commure Engage (formerly known as Rx.Health), a leading digital health and clinical care automation platform, today shared findings from a collaborative partnership with Yale New Haven Health System (YNHHS) that reveal the impact of automated and personalized patient outreach on improving exam completion rates for mammograms and breast ultrasounds performed for breast cancer screening.

“With Commure Engage, we were able to change how we communicate with patients about their upcoming breast imaging appointments across our entire health system. This has led to better informed patients and less missed care opportunities.”

Ensuring consistent adherence to breast cancer screening appointments remains challenging, with common barriers to care access and patient participation including ethnicity, language, and socioeconomic status. To address this critical issue, YNHHS and Commure Engage collaborated to develop an innovative solution: a novel and automated pre-appointment communication program, offered in both English and Spanish and delivered via text message (SMS) or interactive voice response (IVR), to effectively engage patients and provide pre-test information and wayfinding leading to improvements in exam completion rates.

“With Commure Engage, we were able to change how we communicate with patients about their upcoming breast imaging appointments across our entire health system. This has led to better informed patients and less missed care opportunities. In breast imaging, this means more patients are keeping their breast cancer screening and diagnostic imaging appointments, improving our opportunities for radiologists to catch these critical diagnoses earlier,” said Dr. Jay Pahade, medical director of radiology quality and safety for Yale New Haven Health. “We believe this type of transparent and patient-centric communication decreases anxiety, improves patient engagement, and can help reduce healthcare disparities — ultimately improving access and adherence for breast cancer screening.”

In partnership with YNHHS, the Commure Engage platform played a pivotal role in achieving a significant 49% patient engagement rate and relative reduction in patient no-shows and same-day cancellation rates for breast imaging exams by an impressive 54%. This technology partnership between YNHHS and Commure underscores the positive impact of personalized and timely patient outreach to drive patient compliance and improve the overall care experience.

“Through our partnership with Yale New Haven Health, we have an opportunity to meaningfully impact the health and wellbeing of patients and communities across Connecticut, New York, and Rhode Island,” said Richard Strobridge, head of Commure Engage. “Empowering leading providers like Yale to connect with their patients, create opportunities to engage them as collaborators in their unique care journeys, and ultimately drive better clinical outcomes is exactly why we do what we do.”

Supporting resources

• To learn more about how Commure Engage is powering clinical care coordination and patient engagement for health systems across the country, visit commure.com.
• Explore our case study to dive deeper into the partnership between Yale New Haven Health and Commure Engage and the positive results of the initiative on breast cancer screening efforts.
• These results are being shared this week at the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) Annual Meeting in Chicago.

About Commure

Commure, Inc. is connecting disparate datasets, surfacing meaningful insights, accelerating performance through a suite of intuitive applications, and enabling seamless innovation across the healthcare industry. Commure’s mission is to empower every person in the health ecosystem to deliver exceptional care. Commure’s original applications include solutions to improve staff safety, enhance clinical workflow, and bolster revenue operations. Currently, the company enables more than 160,000 clinicians and staff across more than 500 care facilities to advance care through collaboration and supports hundreds of thousands of patients across its national network. Learn more at commure.com.

About Yale New Haven Health

Yale New Haven Health System (YNHHS), the largest and most comprehensive healthcare system in Connecticut, is recognized for advanced clinical care, quality, service, cost effectiveness and commitment to improving the health status of the communities it serves. YNHHS includes five hospitals – Bridgeport, Greenwich, Lawrence + Memorial, Westerly and Yale New Haven hospitals, several specialty networks and Northeast Medical Group, a non-profit medical foundation with several hundred community-based and hospital-employed physicians. Yale New Haven Hospital (YNHH) is affiliated with Yale University and Yale Medicine, the clinical practice of the Yale School of Medicine and the largest academic multi-specialty practice in New England. Yale New Haven Hospital (YNHH) is the primary teaching hospital of Yale School of Medicine. www.ynhhs.org